* note the usage of term "reported". I have used this term because a P4 CPU having HT technology will be reported as 2 even if you know your server has one CPU.

II) Where's the problem?

To identify the problem, you need to run a series of logical tests (Ok, it isn't as scary as it may sound). All you need is some free time, probably 30-45 mins, and root access to your server (expect no magic ;)). Ready to start? Let's go!

Note: Perform the checks multiple times, to reach a fine conclusion.

1. Check for RAM (most common bottleneck!).

# free -m

The output should look similar to this:

# free -m

total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 1963 1912 50 0 28 906 -/+ buffers/cache: 978 985 Swap: 1027 157 869

Any reaction like, "Ohh Gosh, almost all the RAM is used up."? Don't panic. Have a look at the buffers/cache that says "985" mb of RAM is still free in buffers. As long as you have enough memory in the buffers, and your server isnt't using much swap, you're pretty fine on RAM. Your server starts to use SWAP (much like Pagefile), which is part of your disk mapped as memory but it is comparatively very slow and can furthur slower down your system if you have a busy hard disk (which I doubt you wouldn't if you're using so much RAM). In short, at least 175mb available in buffers and no more than 200mb swap.

If RAM is the issue, you should probably look into optimizations on your PHP/Perl scripts, MySQL queries + server, and Apache.

2. Check if I/O (input/output) usage is excessive

If there are too many read/write requests on a single hard disk drive, it will become slow and you'll have to upgrade it to a faster drive (with more RPM and cache). The alternate option to a single faster drive is splitting the load onto multiple drives by spreading the most request content onto multiple drives, which can be easily accomplished using "symlinks" (soft links to files/folders). To identify, if your I/O issue is making your server lag:

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